What to do if the domain is not yours, but you really want to get it? “You need to go to court and take it away,” some lawyers will say.
How AppFollow took away my domain appfollow.com
A well-known company, AppFollow, decided to launch exactly this scenario of taking away a domain that I honestly registered. In May of this year, I received a business proposal from this very serious company about selling the domain appfollow.com for 5 thousand dollars. Judging by the text of the response, they were offended by my refusal.
How AppFollow took away my domain appfollow.com
And then in the fall I received a lawsuit, from which it followed that AppFollow had more rights to this domain than I did. “How so,” I thought. “After all, the date of domain registration was as much as four years earlier than their trademark.”
Dispute over the domain appfollow.com
Anton Sergo, who represented my interests in this process, will most accurately describe the essence of the case.
Formally, the case may seem obvious, since the trademark was registered later than the domain name, which means that there could not have been an unfair registration of the domain. However, the UDRP works not only with the familiar “trademarks”, but also with some other objects, such as unregistered trademarks (a possible analogue in Russian law is a “commercial designation”). Within the framework of this direction, the plaintiff built his position, indicating that despite the registration of the trademark in 2021, the commercial designation (unregistered trademark) appfollow existed since 2014, and it was its legal protection that the plaintiff sought.
The case was considered by the well-known Australian intellectual property lawyer Warwick A. Rothnie. He analyzed the arguments of the parties for quite a long time, but came to the conclusion that the defendant’s bad faith was not established, and the word appfollow itself is descriptive. Thus, the complaint was denied.
Anton Sergo
You can see the WIPO decision itself here.
Interesting facts about the appfollow.com process
It is very amusing when lawyers conducting domain disputes have a weak understanding of the nature of a domain. For example, Versus legal lawyer Alina Davletshina, representing AppFollow, without batting an eyelid, said that in 2017 I owned 13 million domains. She was not embarrassed by this figure, and the judge was forced to explain that Privacy Service is not the name of a company, but a privacy service.
By the way, the lawsuit also listed a mysterious US company, Privacy Service, among the defendants. Here is an excerpt from this moment from the decision:
“Plaintiff points to evidence in the WhoIs record indicating that the registrant of the disputed domain name owned more than 13 million domain names when Defendant registered the disputed domain name, and in 2021, just under one million domain names. Defendant denies this. A study of the WhoIs record shows that these statistics are related to the Privacy Service, through which the disputed domain name was stored at the time.”
Lawyers conducting domain disputes and not knowing how to use the WhoIs service, this is more sad than funny.
Section for those who like to condemn squatters
In order not to write to every hater under every comment, I will write it here right away. The domain market is the same market as the cryptocurrency, oil or gas market. Here, too, people make “money out of thin air”. It just always seems that someone’s food is tastier and the work is easier. But this is due to laziness and envy.
In fact, I work a lot and my personal deals are mainly the sale of ready-made projects that still need to be created and brought to traffic. I invest a lot. Are you ready to buy a domain for 100-500 thousand rubles without any guarantee that you will ever sell it? And then even more money and time into the site in order to ever find a buyer? And I buy such domains and take risks.
Many people have tried to make money on domains, because it would seem that it is available to everyone. There are no more than a hundred financially successful domainers. Many have tried and failed. I know how to monetize my knowledge. I do it and will do it.
And to all those advocating for equality, for “one domain per hand” and the eradication of “speculation”, I would simply suggest going to North Korea to see for themselves what all this can lead to. I like a free, self-regulating market.
The point of no return
A big mistake is to go to WIPO with little chance and lose. This completely kills all chances of getting a domain. If initially it is still possible to somehow appeal to the trademark, then after defeat, the losing party has exhausted all trump cards.
Initially in 2018, when the company representatives approached me, I agreed to give up the domain for a symbolic price, about $ 2,000. But AppFollow was not ready for such a deal. By the way, the cost of filing a claim with WIPO is $1,500. Plus lawyers.
At the moment, AppFollow has zero attempts left to get this domain. For which I sincerely congratulate them and myself!